Have History’s Political Solutions Tried to Fix What Can’t Be? In our eighth post for Confronting the Constitution, we looked at Marxism as a doomed social order; doomed because Marx got the human definition wrong. However, Marx, like Rousseau, did see valid “threats to the soul” in modernity. Reading Marx…

People Really Believed This Stuff? Marx believed that the U.S. — what he termed “the bourgeois republic” — was the final form of state, one to so eviscerate the human soul that its citizens would rebound off the bottom of existence like a collapsing supernova off its iron core. A…

Are You Kidding Me? — I sometimes amuse myself by gazing at the brilliant words of Murray Rothbard (1926–1995), framed and hung on my wall: “Every once in a while, the human race pauses in the job of botching its affairs and redeems itself by a noble work of the intellect.” I liked the quote…

In Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, he notes the strange lives we lead. “Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have lived in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees, and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of…

That born criminals will advance from simple to more sophisticated crimes is so common it’s cliché. Sometimes, criminal behavior finds its paramount expression in stealing whole nations, the way Lenin, Hitler, and Mao did; the way Trump still hopes to. Though in Trump’s case, not for another half-witted ideology, but…

As James Davison Hunter remarks in the Foreword to Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed, “In the young twenty-first century, liberal democracy, that system which marries majority rule to individual rights, has entered a crisis of legitimacy… Deneen’s is a radical critique, arguing that [classical] liberalism needs not reform but retirement. …

Marc F. Plattner’s contribution to Confronting the Constitution presents an insightful look at the marriage of capitalism and republican governance. His historical digging unearths nuance that makes a world of difference in conclusions otherwise uninformed. Central to his essay: is capitalism a matter of freedom or justice? Plattner’s interest lies…

That demagogic cranks emerge, even in healthy societies, is no secret. America’s had scores of them, from Henry Ford and Father Coughlin to Huey Long, Joseph McCarthy, and George Wallace. But in How Democracies Die, political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt write, “An essential test for democracies is not…

In Seven Truths Trump Taught the World, we asked here, “What is a Christian? Complex as that answer can be, might we simplify it as one who at least attempts to practice the teachings of Christ?… But as the world has witnessed of America since 2016, David Hume’s assessment has…